These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  Simply by being here, certainly not by choice, I’d been knocked from my perch atop an invisible fence, the line of non-allegiance I called fairness and true professionalism. I couldn’t stop thinking: no job, no place to sleep, how will I feed myself? This is what comes of overstepping, overextending one’s duty.

  I finally shook Renard off and watched him sprint to the opposite shoulder, where he waited. Dry leaves skittered along the verge, the cigarette’s tip a firefly against the trees’ blackness. Then he leapt the width of the canal.

  If only I’d pocketed another for courage.

  Miss Nightingale’s example made me dart after him. I ate my pride all the way across the cracked asphalt and onto the raised embankment, soles skidding on its slippery cement. I managed to easily jump the stream, and in doing so felt something inside me lunge too. Perhaps it’s how a guest used to restraints feels having tethers loosened, or, heaven forbid, slip and slide away. Perhaps — and this scares me — it’s how one has to feel to undertake our job, and to do it well. A queer mix of fortitude, determination and feeling utterly helpless.

  Once I was in the rustling woods, I gave myself an enervating shake, as Sister advised after an especially difficult shift. I then followed with her calming technique of pushing both arms straight and taut, fingers pointing downwards, and uttering vexed.

  Vexed, vexed, vexed. An awfully silly exercise, yet I swear it helped.

  20

  LUNATIC ASYLUM

  WHENEVER …

  DEAR C,

  You come to me sometimes, still, in my dreams. Does it please you to know this? When you do your voice fends off the terrible shrieking. You would think after all this time I’d be used to it. But the lunatics’ noises are chisels working my brain. Fine-tooth, three-point and flat ones. My brain jailed in my head, jailed in this place where …

  If it mattered to you, wouldn’t you have sprung me from here by now?

  People lay their own traps, you say. In some cases, true. Like Monsieur popping on his silly hat, swinging his walking stick and returning to Our Lady, saying he was off to visit Notre-Dame when it was Rose he was seeing.

  “Oh yes, and her light will be glorious. Here Fido, Fido!” I shouted to his back. “Go home to your bitch.” An overblown poodle, his whore — that snout of hers, those ruffles and frills, and old enough to be Maman.

  Without turning, he told me to shut up.

  As his footsteps died away I picked up a fresh maquette and dropped it, its wet thud like something dead hitting the floor. Then I took up my latest addition to his oeuvre, a woman’s hands modelled as if to cradle a tiny infant’s weight, all self-love abandoned for a love without conditions. The hands wobbled on their board as I held them to the window — the weight of your ambition, chirred a cricket inside me. Do it. One of the hands fell and broke. Each perfect finger snapped off at the knuckle. Do it. I raised the other to toss at the wall but something stopped me — was it you?

  ***

  “WHAT ARE YOU most afraid of?” our brother asked one summer a very, very long time ago, before he had religion or I had Monsieur. We lay on our backs in the garden at Villeneuve watching the clouds. You remember.

  “Afraid of? Pfff. You joke. And you, mon petit?”

  “Of looking stupid. You haven’t answered me.”

  “All right. Of everything. Of nothing. Of denying myself.” Even at his tender age, our little Paul quoted the English Bard:

  “‘When our actions do not, our fears make us traitors.’”

  ***

  “YOU’RE EVEN LOVELIER angry,” Monsieur would say.

  I was angry — furious, who wouldn’t be — when his officious evil friend — never trust those in government — told me, speaking in a voice like blanc mange, to dress my waltzers — dress them, as if they were a cancan girl and her let’s-rent-a-room lover — if I hoped for any kind of commission. Because women didn’t do nudes, he said. God forbid.

  “Don’t take everything so personally,” Monsieur said as we walked along the rue Jacob, defending this baboon, as if any man would bow to such a demand! He gave a hacking laugh as though it was just a dirty little joke. “Women aren’t privy to such … sensual feelings.”

  “If I grew testicles, would my lovers be pleasing? Less scandalous? What would Rose think?”

  He seized my arm roughly and spat into his handkerchief, years’ worth of dust in his lungs even with the praticiens doing all his work. “You play along. Don’t think I haven’t suffered too, the same stupidity. Idiots holding the purse strings …”

  Monsieur stopped to buy wine to fortify me. He opened the bottle at my atelier and, behind my back, filled a glass, which I gratefully drained without thinking twice. A dark if slightly watery red, it didn’t taste off. He watched me take another glassful, not touching a drop himself.

  “Cut out the smut. Drape them,” he said of my figures.

  As soon as he left I realized my folly. Knew I should’ve been more careful. I paid for it, let me tell you. I was up all the night with vomiting and trots. The room spun so badly I had to lie there keeping one foot on the floor.

  I knew for certain I’d been drugged. Drugged and all but poisoned to death! Under the poison’s influence, I gowned my woman from the waist down, gowned her with vines. Roots bound her to the ground as she leaned into her man’s arms. My waltzers were no longer whirling, but suspended, the second before a striptease. On the edge, the promise of an elegant fuck.

  ***

  THE MINISTRY OF Beaux-Arts never did purchase my piece, though it won enough praise from critic-cronies — crickets — that I was able to have plaster and bronze castings made. Ooohs and aaahs. “It’s so Nouveau.”

  Alas, you can’t dine on the chirps of reviewers, on old men eyeing your cleavage while raising toasts “to Mademoiselle — such a pretty thing.” Monsieur — my teacher, mentor, benefactor, friend, you name it — took all the credit.

  ***

  NO ONE ANSWERED my knock when I went to Debussy’s apartment. He was well over me, so it was safe to go. The door was ajar and voices came from within, his and a woman’s. A wife’s? I left his present — a token of our friendship, a little bronze of La Valse — on the threshold. No need for a note, for regards or regrets. He would know the giver by her gift. Fleeing down the stairs and into the street, I knew very well I wouldn’t see him again.

  His name did crop up in the papers, though. For some, C, persistence and perseverance pay off.

  I didn’t give another thought to him. You kept calling out to me, more charming and unattainable than any man. Even the mad know what’s dead can’t be raised, except by Christ. How cheered Paul would be to hear me say that. The closest I’ve come to seeing you, your likeness, was in the Loire, when oh so briefly that fetus swam inside me.

  ***

  I DID GO back there, you know. Once or twice. The landlady welcomed me though her small daughter was the one I wished to see. Her cheeks’ smoothness, her innocent eyes, everything about this child said: Don’t grieve!

  I helped the little girl bathe her dollies among the lilies, play that reminded me of you, of us. Did it wash away my guilt? My sorrow? Not really. My unborn child’s laugh echoed down a corridor composed of water-mirrors. What she might have looked like, what she might have been. A smaller version of you? She begged to be given a body, a face.

  With crayons, manila, and macarons, I paid Madame’s daughter to sit. She wriggled and twitched. Her modelling took months. It was a good thing the dreaded Monsieur persisted in footing my bills — I give him that. Alas, his way of keeping me in his clutches.

  But when the child smiled and the sun lit her pale braided hair it chiselled fine memories. Memories more of the body’s than of the mind’s.

  Yes, yes — she might have been you.

  But like any labouring mother I had to push. Her marble head crowned. Mouth, nose and eyes appeared.

  A heavy braid fell upon her shoulder, the curve of her neck pure grace. Her e
ars were seashells, her lips parted in wonder. Her expression a perfect question mark. The little châtelaine, I christened her, and might’ve wept watching the landlady caress her cheek, then bat away the real girl whining for cake.

  “The easy part, Mademoiselle, is giving birth.”

  The getting of wisdom, the hardening of a childish heart — all these things a mother sees. Our maman no different, C. Childless, I would be spared? Hardly. I’d put myself in Maman’s shoes, watching you.

  Back in Paris I itched to show off my achievement. To show Monsieur what parenting meant. To deliver something into the world without another’s interference, left to its own devices to weigh good with bad.

  But sense steered me clear of him and his new digs on rue de Vaugirard. From Pont Marie I watched the river, swells pocked with rain. In my mind the child to complete my Maman piece grew. Her prototype was my little châtelaine. You.

  The finished sculpture of Madame’s daughter caused a stir at that year’s Salon. An expert execution of Innocence on the cusp of being corrupted, was one happy cricket’s chirp. Others were less kind. The sculptress is the eager recipient of her Master’s gifts, which begs the question why such gifts are devoted to the banal — a child as subject! Don’t we know the domestic has no place in Art?

  Monsieur, predictably, naturally, suggested a Tuesday rendezvous. And I agreed — though at the appointed time I neglected him, to make up with Criteur at the Rotonde. Lingering over coffee, making it last, I wrote a letter to our brother who, riding the coattails of his friend Mallarmé and the wings of his diplomatic career, moved now in America’s circles. La-de-da-de-da.

  When Monsieur arrived only my cat Cléome was there to receive him.

  Though money was tight — the bastard was never all that generous; I had to pick the gutters to feed my cats — I commenced work before visions of you could fizzle. You sprang from my imagination with the pertness of a flower, shaped to fit the mother’s arms but refusing to be coddled. Wiry and unyielding, your figure had a life all its own. A fiery girl who favoured rocks and mud over dolls. And yet … there, hidden, were seeds of the distaff: Maman and me, each of us in you, spinning our separate fates.

  Your neck was a tender stalk supporting a head of wild hair. Serpentine ringlets, writhing locks. A woman’s hair is her crowning glory — didn’t Maman always say? Spun from your head as a maman spider spins its web, your coif signalled the start of a lifetime, a career of spinning that, yes, grows burdensome.

  But in your face would be what I loved about you: something defiant, rebellious and fleeting in that sullen attitude.

  I bolted the door and devoted myself to you, unavailable if anyone called. Welcome visitors were rare. The odd cricket would come to pester me with questions: What drives you to do a man’s work? Who feeds you your ideas? In doing what you love, surely you don’t expect to be paid too — isn’t that a little rich?

  “How much will you make printing this?” I would say. Journalists don’t pay for artists’ time, of course. I had a good idea Monsieur sent these ones to waste mine. At night birds with voices like theirs crowded my dreams. Nattering gossips, they hatched eggs of all doubt’s possibilities.

  “Sink or swim. Rejection is rejection,” said Criteur, ever helpful. “But maybe you should change your line. If a painting doesn’t sell it’s no huge loss. Spare us the horseshit about destiny. You don’t even believe in God.”

  But I did, I do, when it’s convenient.

  Unfolding his penknife, he took an apple from my table, pared away bruises. “You say yourself, many are called but few … if you can’t be one of the chosen, there’s nothing wrong with painting. So what’ll it be, starve or —? It’s just a matter of time before your belly forces your hand.” The knife piercing the skin made a pulpy sound. Cléome leapt from her perch. I gnawed on the peelings. “It doesn’t hurt to please people. People besides yourself.”

  I covered my ears. “Don’t lecture me!” And he was gone.

  But then Monsieur came along, offering more kindness. Stupid to change course in midstream, he said. He inspected the works in my atelier and kinder than ever — oh, he could’ve killed with kindness! — invited me, on this perfect day, on a stroll.

  THE AIR WAS laced with lilacs, the river its echo. Crossing Pont Saint-Michel, my grip on his arm was wary, unwilling. The Palais de Justice, the spire of Sainte-Chapelle, the Hôtel-Dieu, and the yellow-grey of Notre-Dame — that fortress for Christ and such footsoldiers as Paul — loomed before us. Dressed for work, I wore no hat. Could’ve used the silly wedding bonnet in which Monsieur had adorned me in one of his effigies, or the cowl my model wore for Le Psaume. As if God cared whether my head was covered when we passed the cripples begging alms. Outstretched palms, sightless eyes — eyes like statues’.

  Monsieur squinted up at the portals, the pair of us tiny as beetles. The scene of the Last Judgment towered there, depicted in stone: the trumpet blast raising the dead, a stalwart saint holding the balance. The weighing of souls: heaven or hell-bound? You’d have thought of Monsieur’s infamous Porte, maybe pictured him at the weigh scale. I’m sure he did.

  In the echoing nave, light glowered through the transepts, a red and blue bruise on the checkerboard floor. All that worn-down marble reminded me of our Paul’s Damascus. Candles flickered. Our footsteps echoed. Gazing up into the heavenly vaults, I felt everything foreshorten. Your life, mine, and oh so much glory, we who worshipped stars, contained by these brutish walls. Lord, I am not worthy stuck to my churlish tongue like a hair. Far above, the rustling wings of pigeons. An invisible bird came to roost on my shoulder, Maman’s spirit digging in its talons.

  Monsieur tugged my sleeve, whispering hoarsely, praising the divinity of this and the divinity of that. Ceiling braces, buttresses, quatrefoil, rosette. His ears were cocked, you could tell, for trumpets blaring his greatness. A woman in widow’s weeds praying over the poor box failed to glance up as he rambled about heaven this, heaven that, the heaven of people’s fondest imaginings. Birth, love, suffering, death — life’s spectrum was represented here. On and on.

  Profane, Paul would’ve called it. I was sick of this slavish routine. “You’re full of it,” I said.

  The sun lighting the vast rose window cast a watery purple wheel over us. The cosmic rose. The Catherine wheel — instrument of punishment and torture.

  “As if we belong here. Sinners. Fornicators.” Made so very, very small, I wanted only to disappear.

  “Speak for yourself, my dear. You might try thinking first.”

  “You might try thinking before fucking —”

  “So prudish all of a sudden. There’s the confessional. Tell the priest, if you’re feeling guilty,” he said.Sinners little better than dogs fouling God’s nest. The widow rummaged for coins for the box.

  “Ah! Charity.” Monsieur’s grip on my arm was shrewish. Truthfully? I could have separated each of his fingers from their sockets.

  “And doesn’t charity begin at home?” For I was thinking, honestly, of his grand collage with Rose. His kindness to me a choke chain while he and his bitch were locked in the act. Two greysnouted dogs going at it.

  “Leave her,” I mocked him, before a priest came and told us to quiet down.

  Leave her. It was a lament for what might’ve been, for a lifetime’s grief outreaching anything. The last thing it was, a plea.

  ***

  ONCE, COMPLETELY OUT of the blue, our papa appeared. A stranger, he had aged since I’d last seen him at Paul’s, at a small reception mon petit gave himself before embarking on his first trip abroad.

  Papa smelled the same as always: pipe tobacco and ink, as if it seeped from his bookkeeper’s pores. He kissed my cheeks, asked how I was, petted Cléome’s head, all without once mentioning Maman. Departing, he left behind an envelope. I watched him totter down the sidewalk as quickly as possible with the aid of his walking stick. Briefly he turned and waved, the way he used to leaving us on Monday mornings.

&nbs
p; “Come back anytime, please, Papa!” I shouted so that I swear everyone on the Boulevard d’Italie heard.

  So happy to have seen him, astonished at how painfully I missed him, I almost overlooked his envelope. To my shamed delight a pauper’s fortune was inside. It enabled me to complete the clay version of my Maman et Enfant, as much of your figures as I could. Both faces I left blank though, the better to arrive at, eventually, the exact expressions for each, once our differences were put to rest. Maman’s and mine, once we were reconciled, of course we would be; and to a lesser degree, mine and yours. I had to be true to both of you, you see, and wasn’t yet ready. Until I was, any expressions given you were bound to be sentimental and false — falsely sentimental.

  Good things come to those who wait, our brother says. Truth in art takes lifetimes to convey.

  ***

  PAPA’S IMPROMPTU VISIT softened my resolve about locking doors. Exhausted by work, I witnessed things that should’ve kept me alert. The flash, for instance, of a cloaked shoulder glimpsed in a grackle’s blue-black head. A pickpocket seen in a dog disappearing under a hedge during a late-night stroll through a park. My imagination, of course. I was working all hours. But in such a state my guard was let down. In such a state you become a target.

  I’d barely lifted your maquette to its shelf when Monsieur the meddler appeared unannounced, a stubby gnome in his twee black cap. As if the altercation in Notre-Dame had never happened. Lacking the decency to knock, he ogled my masterpiece. My mistresspiece.

  Standing much too close, he fingered the bone at the top of my spine. Eyes full of crocodile tears narrowed in his trademark squint. Was he too vain for spectacles? That prying gaze! For once he was speechless.

  To protect my mother-and-child, I confess I threw myself at him. Set myself between him and you. A quaint reversal: a womanly Perseus fending off the monster’s stare with kisses. I succumbed to his, steering him away.

  “Come to dinner, Mademoiselle.”

  I did, because I was hungry and had spent the last of Papa’s money. But dining in the grotty rue Mouffetard wasn’t what I’d expected. He was ashamed of my attire, so unsuited to the chic cafés he favoured. The dingy place he took me to was warm, though, and served large portions. I refused the wine, of course, careful to keep an eye on his every move. He’d grown up nearby, I knew, so despite all his airs this was his turf.